Crazy Clock

My Nan and Granddad had one of these and I used to look forward to going round their house just to play this game (oh, and because they game me sweets, but it was mostly about this game, honest!)

It was a lot like the game “Mousetrap”, if you can remember that? It had an elaborate contraption element to it. However, Mousetrap was always about trying to build the whole board for the marble to go down and around. A race against the clock, so that the marble could get to it’s final destination.

Well, this Crazy Clock came with a pack of cards illustrating, step-by-step, how to build the Rube Goldberg contraption (Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist from who’s drawings the inspiration for the game came from). However, the deck of cards is dealt out randomly to the players.

The player with card 1 plays it, assembling the parts indicated on the card. He continues playing cards in sequence if he can. When he no longer can, he grabs a random card from the player to his left (unless it is that player's last card) --which may allow him to continue. If not, the player who has the next card plays it, and so on. The last card gives that player a chance to crank the clock and wake the sleeper (and win!). If that fails, play passes to his right.

Brilliant it was – I eventually figured out how to build the contraption without the cards, though it HAD to be done in order and if it wasn’t then I didn’t’ get any sweets!

It was released in the late 1960’s but I played it in the 1980’s, and it was made right up until 1988. Though of course Mousetrap is still made today!

It was great being the winner of the game and being able to activate the “machine” and wake up a sleeping figure in bed through a series of moving pieces and marbles.